Mandal Commission quotas were implemented only after ten years and sparked violent upper-caste backlash

Evidence

As prime minister of a non-Congress, Janata Dal–led coalition government from December 1989 to November 1990, Vishwanath Pratap Singh (1931–2008) took the decision to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission, which fixed a quota for members of the Backward Classes in jobs in the public sector to redress caste discrimination. The Commission, named after B.P. Mandal, a parliamentarian who headed it, had been established in 1979 by another non-Congress (Janata Party) government, headed by Morarji Desai, but the recommendations of its 1980 report—which extended the scope of reservation in public sector employment beyond Dalits and Adivasis, and allocated 27 per cent to Other Backward Classes (OBCs)—had not been implemented for ten years. When it was implemented, the privileged castes took to the streets. They symbolically swept the streets, pretended to shine shoes and performed other ‘polluting’ tasks to suggest that instead of becoming doctors, engineers, lawyers or economists, the policy of reservation was now going to reduce privileged castes to doing menial tasks. A few people attempted to publicly immolate themselves, the most well-known being a Delhi University student, Rajiv Goswami, in 1990. Similar protests were repeated in 2006 when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance tried to extend reservation to the OBCs in institutes of higher education. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 566

Categorization

• SEED: The dramatic irony of upper castes staging ‘polluting’ work to protest a policy meant to punish caste-based pollution is a striking image for an essay on caste performance.
• ADDENDUM: The staged sweeping and shoe-shining protests mirror the performative caste ritual themes in the complaint-about-immodesty / sacrifice essays rather than directly, but the theater of caste hierarchy connects to graft-trees metaphor of roles people are grafted into.
• XREF: Directly serves reader’s interest in how caste annihilation policy was implemented and the resistance it earned—the ‘scaling’ of reservation as institutional remedy.